MUSINGS AND COMMENTARIES FROM A CONSERVATARIAN

Archive for June 23rd, 2011

In the must see 5:08 video below, Pennsylvania Representative Mike Kelly rebukes Democrats for playing politics when the country’s future’s at stake.

The freshman congressman from Pennsylvania’s Third District raked Democrat lawmakers over the coals for caring more about getting re-elected than doing their job and planning a budget.

“It is irresponsible to sit here and continue to talk about a budget that you don’t like verses a budget you didn’t even have the courage to put before the public last fall, and to force us into doing continuing resolutions. Why? Because you didn’t have the stomach to do what was right because you had an election sitting in front of you.”

Kelly said that he couldn’t understand how the Democrats could criticize Congressman Paul Ryan’s budget proposal when they didn’t have the courage to even pass a budget.

“Only in this Beltway are we so far out in la- la land that we don’t understand that if America is truly gonna recover, it’s gonna be by Americans that make those decisions, not Republicans and not Democrats. … As a guy who’s had to pay his own way his whole life, I am greatly offended by the idea that somehow, somebody in Washington knows how to spend my money better than I do. That somebody in Washington knows how to regulate me to the point where I can’t even borrow money anymore.”

The congressman’s rebuke of Democrat demagoguery was spot on, but too long in coming.

Dutch politician Geert Wilders of the Party for Freedom was acquitted today of hate speech violations by an Amsterdam district court, ending a three-year prosecution.

Presiding Judge Marcel van Oosten said that Wilders’ remarks were “hurtful” “shocking” and “offensive” but not criminal because they were made in the context of public debate about multiculturalism and integration.

Wilders’ case tested the limits of free speech in a country with a history of tolerance for free expression, but dominated in recent years by leftist ideology and political correctness.

“This means that his political views are condoned by law, his political rhetoric has been legalized”—Andre Krouwel, political scientist at Amsterdam’s Free University

Wilders, an outspoken critic of Islam, Muslim immigration, and multiculturalism in the Netherlands, has been gaining popularity among Dutch citizens who blame their government’s immigration aid policies for rising unemployment, increasing ethnic crime, and keeping Muslim immigrants from assimilating into Dutch society.

Like Martin Luther before the Imperial Diet at Worms, Geert Wilders was blessed with the courage of his convictions to stand before an unsympathetic tribunal and confront his totalitarian accusers who would deny him his God-given right to speak his mind and follow his conscience.

May the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob continue to strengthen and embolden Geert Wilders in the fight against the evil of totalitarianism.

According to the soon-to-be-released book Left Turn by UCLA political science professor Tim Groseclose, the mainstream media have moved so far to the left in their reporting that they make moderate news organizations appear right-wing to the people who get their news from mainstream media outlets.

“According to my analysis, the Drudge Report is approximately the most fair, balanced, and centrist news outlet in the United States. Yet, the overwhelming majority of media commentators claim that it has a conservative bias.”

Groseclose says that most reporters (93 percent of Washington, DC, correspondents vote Democrat) promote issues that the left wants in the news cycle, and they ignore or downplay issues that conservatives want in the news cycle. Their leftist bias distorts news stories and keeps news consumers from seeing both sides of an issue.

“That bias makes us more liberal, which makes us less able to detect the bias, which allows the media to get away with more bias, which makes us even more liberal.”

The professor claims that the mainstream media’s influence on the electorate adds about 8 to 10 percentage points to Democrat candidates in a typical election.